System Administration Commands fping(lM)
NAME
fping - send ICMP ECHOREQUEST packets to network hosts
SYNOPSIS
fping [ options ] [ systems... ]
DESCRIPTION
fping is a like program which uses the Internet Control Mes-
sage Protocol (ICMP) echo request to determine if a target
host is responding. fping differs from ping in that you can
specify any number of targets on the command line, or
specify a file containing the lists of targets to ping.
Instead of sending to one target until it times out or
replies, fping will send out a ping packet and move on to
the next target in a round-robin fashion.
In the default mode, if a target replies, it is noted and
removed from the list of targets to check; if a target does
not respond within a certain time limit and/or retry limit
it is designated as unreachable. fping also supports sending
a specified number of pings to a target, or looping indefin-
itely (as in ping ).
Unlike ping , fping is meant to be used in scripts, so its
output is designed to be easy to parse.
OPTIONS
-a Show systems that are alive.
-A Display targets by address rather than DNS name.
-bn Number of bytes of ping data to send. The minimum size
(normally 12) allows room for the data that fping needs
to do its work (sequence number, timestamp). The
reported received data size includes the IP header
(normally 20 bytes) and ICMP header (8 bytes), so the
minimum total size is 40 bytes. Default is 56, as in
ping. Maximum is the theoretical maximum IP datagram
size (64K), though most systems limit this to a
smaller, system-dependent number.
-Bn In the default mode, fping sends several requests to a
target before giving up, waiting longer for a reply on
each successive request. This parameter is the value
by which the wait time is multiplied on each successive
request; it must be entered as a floating-point number
(x.y). The default is 1.5.
-c Number of request packets to send to each target. In
this mode, a line is displayed for each received
response (this can suppressed with -q or -Q). Also,
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System Administration Commands fping(lM)
statistics about responses for each target are
displayed when all requests have been sent (or when
interrupted).
-C Similar to -c, but the per-target statistics are
displayed in a format designed for automated response-
time statistics gathering. For example:
% fping -C 5 -q somehost
somehost : 91.7 37.0 29.2 - 36.8
shows the response time in milliseconds for each of the
five requests, with the "-" indicating that no response
was received to the fourth request.
-d Use gethostbyaddr(3NSL) to lookup address of return
ping packet. This allows you to give fping a list of IP
addresses as input and print hostnames in the output.
-e Show elapsed (round-trip) time of packets.
-f Read list of targets from a file.
% fping < targetsfile
-g Generate a target list from a supplied IP netmask, or a
starting and ending IP. Specify the netmask or
start/end in the targets portion of the command line.
ex. To ping the class C 192.168.1.x, the specified com-
mand line could look like either:
fping -g 192.168.1.0/24
or
fping -g 192.168.1.0 192.168.1.255
-h Print usage message.
-in The minimum amount of time (in milliseconds) between
sending a ping packet to any target (default is 25).
-l Loop sending packets to each target indefinitely. Can
be interrupted with ctl-C; statistics about responses
for each target are then displayed.
-m Send pings to each of a target host's multiple inter-
faces.
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System Administration Commands fping(lM)
-n Same as -d.
-p In looping or counting modes (-l, -c, or -C), this
parameter sets the time in milliseconds that fping
waits between successive packets to an individual tar-
get. Default is 1000.
-q Quiet. Don't show per-target results, just set final
exit status.
-Qn Like -q, but show summary results every n seconds.
-rn Retry limit (default 3). This is the number of times an
attempt at pinging a target will be made, not including
the first try.
-s Print cumulative statistics upon exit.
-tn Initial target timeout in milliseconds (default 500).
In the default mode, this is the amount of time that
fping waits for a response to its first request. Suc-
cessive timeouts are multiplied by the backoff factor.
-u Show targets that are unreachable.
-v Print fping version information.
EXAMPLES
The following perl script will check a list of hosts and
send mail if any are unreachable. It uses the open2 function
which allows a program to be opened for reading and writing.
fping does not start pinging the list of systems until it
reads EOF, which it gets after INPUT is closed. Sure the
open2 usage is not needed in this example, but it's a good
open2 example none the less.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
require 'open2.pl';
$MAILTO = "root";
$pid = &open2("OUTPUT","INPUT","/usr/local/bin/fping -u");
@check=("slapshot","foo","foobar");
foreach(@check) { print INPUT "$\n"; }
close(INPUT);
@output= |
